Charles Dickerson isn't a latecomer to the L.A. beat scene—considering his long rapport with Flying Lotus, whom he remixed on 2008's L.A. EP 2 X 3, you could actually call him an early face on the front lines. But while Mono/Poly isn't without his own identity, he's spent much of the last six years hopping from mode to mode and trying his best to leave unmistakably individual fingerprints all over whatever feels a few months away from really popping. Between the ethereal yet jittery soul of his scattered singles throughout the late '00s, the b-boy IDM of his self-released 2010 full-length Paramatma, and the overdriven sludgestep on 2011's Manifestations EP, there's a lot of strong work in the past to justify excitement for his Brainfeeder debut full-length.
There's just one catch: his adaptability goes hand in hand with his unpredictability, and it's still unclear which sound he's best at. Golden Skies pulls a new mode to the fore—one that exhibits the ease with which he draws out flowing ambience, tamps down his noisier tendencies, and sneaks in trace elements of techno that add a sharp edge to his floatier moments. If that sounds frustratingly vague, well, that's the kind of sound we're dealing with here. It's an instrumental beat record where texture matters more than just about anything else from genre to mood.
It's still rewarding to work your way through interpretations of those other issues, though. One of the early jolts of surprise on this record takes place when opening cut "Winds of Change" drops some straight-up acid house 303 squelches into the proceedings, taking a track that sounded like the prettiest possible rendition of sheet metal being torn apart over Timbaland drums and drawing all kinds of directional arrows spiraling out from its center. There's nods to R&B's low-lit, minimal corners, including the album's sole vocal track, the Mendee Ichikawa feature "Empyrean", which blooms into a spacious swoon. Rock-solid beats crop up to knock around elastic vocal snippets through a curtain of burbling arpeggios on "Alpha & Omega" and "Urania", pierce the hovering chords of "Night Garden", and boost the funk-fusion oomph of "Gamma," which radiates like a space heater.
The big hook on Golden Skies to pull listeners in centers around just what Mono/Poly does with well-known synthesizer sounds. The record resembles a lot of recent Brainfeeder-y stuff you might've heard before, except tinkered with a bit and with a more dazed approach to the cosmic allusions of Ras G's Back on the Planet, or the euphoric disorientation of Flying Lotus' Until the Quiet Comes and Thundercat's Apocalypse. (Incidentally, that latter album featured a track that Mono/Poly collaborated on, "Heartbreaks + Setbacks", that anticipated this album's sound.) It sounds like he's got a while to go before he arrives at a signature style, which is a good thing, because his current efforts to pull everything at reach into his orbit makes for some appealing mutations.
